DMGTwo Steps Forward, One Step Back
More performance improvements! The front page should be getting pretty snappy for everyone. The total number of database queries is down from 400 to 20, and most of the queries that are still running go faster than they used to. My profile data now says that talking to the database is emphatically not the major time sink.
What is? My URL rewriting filter. I don't have access to the servers Apache mod_rewrite rules, so I have a Servlet Filter set up that grabs all incomming URLs and does some regexp magic with them. Unfortunately, this has to be done for every request, and the worst case scenario (comparing the URL to a long list of regexps only to find none of them match) is both very bad and very common. In fact, it's the typical case. Ouch.
Oh well. It's exactly the kind of thing that you do when you don't have full access to server configuration. My hosting bill is $5/mo, so I'm not going to sweat this.
And Twitter seems to have a bug, which is why that left-hand column is blank at the moment. I've filed a bug report, and I'm going to add some error-handling code to my end so that I can display a cute little "fail whale" or something when this happens.
And I've just spotted a problem: it looks like the number of comments isn't loading into blog entry header info properly. It's right in the detail pages, but not on the front page. Doh!